


5

by hhopp



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-08 06:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10380138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hhopp/pseuds/hhopp
Summary: The one where Castiel cannot put Dean Winchester back together this time.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy!

1—

 

He couldn’t help but think, morbidly, that the blood might have looked like red ribbon coming off of spools in Sam’s chest, unwound by invisible claws. Might have, were it not dark and wet, dumping out onto the ground as if breaking free from a prison. Might have, were it not sticky, a thick mucus which was not where it was supposed to be. 

 

When would they learn to quit making deals? 

 

As he lay dying, reverted to a state of practically infantile incapacity, the man gurgled a dying wish. It did not even fall on his brother’s deaf ears, but the angel nodded. He would not allow Dean to bring him back. Not this time. 

 

Mary had been right about one thing, and that was that angels had always been watching over Dean Winchester. Specifically, him. And Castiel had watched as, at 10 years old, Dean sat in an elementary school art classroom, creating a toucan from oil pastels. The teacher had just shown her students to add a small white circle in the eye. “It shows us they’re alive,” she had said. And it was only when that small white circle left Sam’s eye that he released his hold on Dean’s arms. 

 

The man he’d once known solely by the title of “righteous” stumbled— no, _crawled_ — towards his little brother’s limp form. He collapsed over the mutilated mass of flesh and bone, barely recognizable from the hunter and friend they had known, and in that moment Castiel watched as a human soul collapsed like a house of cards. Many types of damage could be erased with time. This was not one of them. 

 

They stayed there for a long while. Dean would not have been moved any more easily than a mountain by the average person, and he did not even try. 

 

The sky was black and boundless, the dark of it interrupted only by white stars, and visible through the open doors of the barn they were in. Crickets rehearsed their symphony for a show that would never come, and owls called back and forth between trees like little children, both uncaring of the human suffering going on in the rotting wooden structure nearby. The wind reached her frigid fingers inside and scraped her fingernails along their backs. Castiel shrugged out of his trench coat and laid it over Dean’s shoulders like armor; or, perhaps, a security blanket. He received no response. 

 

An hour passed, then two.

 

Shaking hands picked hay off of well-worn flannel. _He’ll wake up. He’ll wake up_. They shook at stiffened shoulders. They tripped into some semblance of folded as a tight throat emptied itself of a prayer. They covered red and green eyes as the thunderstorm started. They dropped, defeated, into a lap, as a realization made itself comfortable in their owner’s mind: _this time it’s real_. 

 

When Castiel lifted one breathing body and one still one into the black car, only half of a soul came with him.


	2. II

2— 

 

He was loud, but he did not speak. Music was ripped from speakers at volumes mothers warn their teenaged sons and daughters about, drunken in greedily like the last drops of the cure for some squalid disease. Car doors were slammed. Guns were scrubbed with something akin to malice and nothing was set down gently. 

 

His silence expanded like open road. Like galaxies— and Castiel would have taken it in universes if only they were in a parallel one in which Sam had survived. He grieved inside. Dragged the dull-thudding, achy spirit of his out of slumber each morning and went through the motions as if nothing was wrong. Keeping the hurting quiet was a battle tactic long familiar to him. Dean had not learned this war strategy: his pain was messy. 

 

He could not read minds, but the furrow of Dean’s eyebrows and the clench of his fists were bolded headlines. And today they said that if he didn’t know how heaven was just an abandoned attic, God’s absence the light-consuming darkness of a bare bulb just burnt out, he’d be screaming prayers until his throat was raw. Yesterday they said that he wished he could salt and burn his dead insides. 

 

He couldn’t set them aflame, but that’s not to say that Castiel didn’t watch him try to singe them with hard liquor. This was not a normal heart broken. This was a heart splintered, like a wooden door broken down by an axe in a house fire. And that house— that home, Dean’s epicenter of happiness and light— was gutted, scraped clean like the insides of orange gourds in late fall, painting over the picture of a man until he was a contorted, grimacing jack-o-lantern. 

 

When Dean was drunk, he tried to start fistfights with him. Castiel allowed it; being made of cast iron and concrete, this would not hurt him, but it would occupy Dean until he stopped seeing red. A punching bag stuffed with black feathers, silent as a graveyard, he stood and took the abuse until bloody knuckles stopped smacking, until gut-wrenching, visceral screams took their place. Until Dean toppled to the ground and rolled onto his side, knees curving up over his mangled core, and fell into his seething silence once again. 

 

It was when the flames cooled to embers, and then ashes, that Castiel began to worry.


	3. III

3—

 

The grey sweats that he refused to change out of matched the dullness of his aura. His sallowing skin became tight around firm bones, stretched like plastic wrap as he stopped eating. Castiel became the parent trying to feed the child and every little morsel forced past plump lips a battle hard-won. 

 

Humans processed pain in stages. He had to hide all of the knives in the bunker because Dean had stopped being angry and wanted to bargain with the blades, to bring his brother back or to obliterate the stone-cold, stone-hard apple core of pain trapped in his solar plexus. Or both— it didn’t matter, the sharp edges had to go. 

 

Today, the grief looked the way it was supposed to, not red and furious nor throbbing and deafeningly silent— just _agony_. That sort of bone-twisting hurt only completely understood by the old painters and poets filled up every crevice and nook and cranny until there was no Dean, no Castiel, no tomorrow or yesterday, only pain. The righteous man drifted through the bunker, dead man walking, and you couldn’t even call him a ghost because he had no spirit. His steps echoed in a mechanical sort of funeral march, the leaden tin footsteps of an automaton on autopilot. 

 

The bright citrus greens of the cemetery’s grass made for an almost laughable contrast to Dean’s withered insides. The hunter had to be propped up in his chair before the coffin, his suit peeling off like old wallpaper in the bright, cold sunlight. As the black-clad gravediggers lowered the heavy coffin into the earth, the angel had to restrain his charge to keep him from throwing himself in after, the soft soil a cliff’s edge guarded by soldierly tombstone.

 

After, Dean curled into the fetal position in the passenger seat, head falling into Castiel’s lap. On this day of death, his circle of life narrowed down to the wide saucers that were his eyes, the warrior turned back into a child innocently asking the grownup to make it alright. It was the most responsive he’d been in weeks. 

 

There was no English word for the feeling that clung to them like woodfire smoke, the intense longing for happy old days, for the way things used to be. The Welsh had named the yearning _Hiraeth._ Hiraeth, he wanted to scream it from a rooftop. Hiraeth, he wanted to pound his fists into the word until it broke. Hiraeth, he wanted to punish the syllables for his anguish until nothing but a crater remained; surely if everything were obliterated the hurting could not hold fast, surely Sam would walk down the stairs and start flipping through a book, surely Dean would come back to life. Oh, he loved him, loved him the way the stars loved the sky and fish loved the sea. 

 

Trying to repair the broken glass of his heart was going so slowly, the angel was no more than a photographer without a camera. The sting of loss had faded for him, now there was only the venomous bite of watching as the one he loved slowly collapsed into dust. 


	4. IV

4—

 

Castiel did not know when stage three became stage four, only that it was worse. The “what-if-I-had”s turned into “why-me”s, and his sunken eyes descended further and further, as if into quicksand. 

 

They found a letter in the library a few days after they buried him. Sam’s messy scrawl, laid neatly between the pages of a book, sent Dean into hysterics; Castiel had never seen that look in the eye of a person, only a fearful animal— and crouched on the hardwood, he keened, the throat-scraping sound echoing a bobcat’s. 

 

Dean spent more time on the ground these days. Sometimes he’d fallen to his knees, the tears heavier than his body could bear. Other days, he was sleeping. He’d found him that way all over the bunker. In the kitchen, the library, his bedroom. Once, underneath the war room table. Never on his bed, though. He always refused to sleep until he couldn’t stay awake anymore; it was the nightmares. 

 

They’d been sitting on the couch one afternoon. Dean was between his legs, staring at the wall in front of them, when slowly, _slowly_ , his eyelids fell like garage doors and his weight relaxed completely against Castiel’s chest, reservations erased in his exhaustion. 

 

He let him sleep. It had been several days, now, and some rest would do him some good. But in two hours, Dean woke, all thrashing arms and wild eyes, soundless screams leaping out of him like a man off a cliff, at a monster which had vanished into smoke. He stilled as Castiel grabbed at his arms, but his shallow breaths did not deepen. The soil clots in his lungs clogged the airways, forcing out one wheezing gasp after another. Castiel hushed him, folded both of their hands over his heart and told him to focus on the heartbeats, took deep breaths for him to mimic. Dean got off the sofa and went to sharpen a knife. He didn’t see him for the rest of the day. 

 

In the mornings, he always went to the kitchen and found him clutching a coffee cup in one hand and the letter in the other. Dean always looked like he was trying to make them part of himself, integrate the ceramic and the parchment into his skin. (The paper was already water-spotted and soft. The grey of the pencil had smudged near the last “I’m sorry,” he’d already traced his finger over it so many times that it started fading away. Castiel knew that soon every word would be gone, leaving only the imprint in Dean’s mind and heart.) He always pressed a kiss to his unwashed hair and reminded him to eat something— Dean always hummed vaguely at him and retreated back into his mind, eyes so blank they might’ve been mirrors. 

 

He couldn’t do _anything_. Trying to fix his hunter, it was like trying to fix a torn paper doll with a screwdriver; he only ended up making a bigger mess of him, whenever he tried. It was some exquisite form of torture, this helplessness. The paper doll kept tearing.

 

Then the paper doll stopped. 


	5. V

5—

 

The first laugh came five months after. It had sounded out, not like a bell, but a gong. A deep, rumbly thing at some story he’d been telling him. He couldn’t even remember which one it was, now, but Castiel was glad he’d chosen it. 

 

He didn’t dare to hope, that first time, that it meant everything would be okay. 

 

(The laughter grew to be more common, and he allowed himself to be optimistic.)

 

The first kiss came the month after that. They were on the couch again, some television show buzzing like a bumble bee beneath their conversation. When quiet, for a moment, lapsed, he turned around in Castiel’s arms and pressed his lips against his. It could hardly even be called a kiss, not really, but they both started glowing like fireflies. Dean turned back around and acted as if nothing had happened, when really, everything had. 

 

Castiel had kissed him before, sure, but those weren’t real. Dry pecks to his temples and forehead, little tokens of caretaker’s affection. But those kisses, lips to lips with unwhispered _I love you’s_ attached… 

 

He really enjoyed those.

 

As more and more time passed, Dean recovered. He hated to use that word, hated implying that their lost comrade was a sickness. But the grief eased away, like a bloody mural being painted over, each new day another brush stroke. They held hands, now. Played cards. It was good. 

 

And, of course, there were still bad days. When Dean found a folder chock-full of old pictures on his computer, or when they decided to clean out Sam’s old room. Those were the days when he folded back inside himself like origami, when he retreated behind stone walls in his mind and didn’t come out until some invisible storm had passed. They were becoming few and far between, though, so Castiel’s newfound optimism did not falter the way it might have before.

 

It was an afternoon in the beginning of July that finally convinced him everything would be alright. He’d woken late and laid in bed for a while, enjoying the quiet and the stillness. A guitar solo wafted down the hallway and coated his ears like butter on toast; in the kitchen was Dean, sleeves rolled up and flour in his hair, rolling some sort of dough to within an inch of its sticky little life. He was humming. When Castiel walked into the room he looked up and bared his teeth in a smile far too pretty for any cliché to describe.

 

They laughed together; Dean let him pour the cherry filling into the pie crust. And when the oven dinged and they started eating the pastry so fast it burnt their tongues, the red dribble down the side of his mouth did not make either of them think of blood. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not as happy with chapter 4 as I am the rest. Oh well.
> 
> I own nothing. Kudos, Comments, you know the drill if you've ever read an author's note before.


End file.
